It's the Little Things in Life
by guacamole lover
Summary: Three weeks after Annabeth was forced to move across the country, she decided her life was pathetic, especially since she considered a hedgehog her best friend, held regular marathons of The Office, ate copious amounts of Swedish Fish instead of dinner, showered irregularly, and spent most of her time composing pretentious poems on stolen Starbucks' napkins. Percabeth. Modern AU.


Three weeks after Annabeth was dragged across the country in metaphorical chains, she decided her life was pathetic, especially because she considered a hedgehog her best friend, held regular sixteen-hour marathons of _The Office_ in her bedroom, ate copious amounts of Swedish Fish instead of dinner, showered irregularly, and spent most of her time composing poems that were more pretentious than artistic on napkins stolen from Starbucks.

In the myriad stories whose plot circulates around some girl being uprooted and dumped three thousand miles from home, there's a specific and much too cliché script that is followed: Girl goes to new school. Girl is stared at and gossiped about as she walks to her locker. Girl becomes fixated with Angst-Ridden Bad Boy™, whose profound personality consists of abusive tendencies and smirking, and by page two hundred they're buying condoms.

Annabeth's experience was not like that.

She began attending the mold-infested building devoted to imparting crucial information to teens—such as how to find the cost of thirty discounted watermelon at Walmart—on the eighth of September, which was only five days after everyone else began, so there was nothing exciting about her belated entrance to eleventh grade. Most people just ignored her. There was the occasional comment about her matted blonde curls or a snide remark about her imperious aloofness (read: apathetic introversion), but other than that, she slipped by unnoticed.

Which was fine by her.

Besides her hedgehog, the sole living organism she didn't currently detest, the only tolerable aspect of the new city was the walking: to school, from school, winding through parks and alleys during free time, earbuds in and a sandwich bag full of cheap candy ready for the pigeons. She walked and her mind became swathed in the twitter of voices and the purring of car engines and the slap of her feet against pavement—and that was how she liked it. It was dull. Monotonous. Predictable.

That is, until her afternoon walk catapulted her into a near-death experience containing a satanic pumpkin, a potential serial killer, the consequences of gravity, and her first of many, many encounters with Percy Jackson.

* * *

Exhaust fumes stung Annabeth's nose as she trudged down the sidewalk, hands shoved in the pockets of her oversized aviator jacket. It smelled like rotting pickles, all pungent and acrid but sickly sweet at the same time, and did nothing to abate the ache that shackled her head. It felt as if an orthodontist had mistaken her forehead for a row of crooked teeth. Her eyes watered with every blink. And, perhaps most random and annoying of all, the tip of her nose had gone inexplicably numb.

It shouldn't have made such a big difference, being unable to sense the presence of her nose, but it jabbed at her consciousness, whining for attention. The most annoying thing was that she didn't know _why; _neither the weather or her surroundings offered any clues for her nerves' mutiny: The air was soupy and warm, the kind that hovered in the no-man's land between seasons and melted in gooey patches on your skin; and the condos that lined the street were decorated like a fall decor Pinterest board, all rustic tins and wreaths and bursts of autumnal colors. Neither of them trumpeted an obvious reason as to why her nose felt like a popsicle were giving it mouth-to-mouth.

Several yards ahead of Annabeth, a cluster of joggers rounded the corner and, capturing her in a stampede of sweaty bodies and snippets of panted words, half-ran, half-elbowed past her as if she were nothing more than a mobile lamp-post.

"Yes, I've already bought . . . tickets for the . . . _festival._ Lucinda is simply _dying _to see . . . the corn maze—"

"The corn maze? I thought . . . it was a . . . _hay bale _male, are you sure . . ."

Their riveting conversation faded as they galloped away like a herd of neon-clothed gazelle, leaving Annabeth resentfully rubbing her aching side, courtesy of a water bottle smacking into her ribs. "Oh, don't mind me," she muttered peevishly, addressing the uncarved pumpkin guarding the steps to her right. "It's my fault, I shouldn't have gotten in the way of their precious—"

Due to absolutely no fault of her own, the peeling tip of her sneaker attacked a crack in the sidewalk. Stumbling forward and barely catching herself, she cursed as the edge of a backpacked textbook drove itself into her neck, then righted herself and glared at the pumpkin, who, as the closest inanimate object she could blame, surely must have been the perpetrator of the incident.

"You distracted me," she said accusingly.

The sunlight spun an amused smile from shadows onto its ridged surface.

Annabeth flipped it off (a mature and justified decision, she thought), and kept walking.

Despite her recent brush with the consequences of gravity—or the curse of a bewitched pumpkin, either one—Annabeth continued to drag her feet down the sidewalk in the same manner as before. Unsurprisingly, less than a minute passed before her shoe scraped against pavement, snagged on a crack, and sent her body lurching forward once again.

Scrape. Lurch. Catch.

Scrape . . . _lurch _. . . catch.

For reasons completely unrelated to the exhausted state of her mind, Annabeth clung to the mechanical movements of the strange dance, and as the afternoon warmth migrated to the cusp of evening chill, and the pinched condos hemming the street surrendered to apartments with rosy bricks and bay windows, she perfected the art of scuffing, snagging, and pitching forward just long enough to make her stomach swoop.

Dull. Monotonous. Predictable.

Several blocks ahead of her, a motorcycle snarled toward an upcoming crosswalk. Her stomach growled with it and, continuing her odd game en route to the crosswalk, she let her thoughts wander to the crumpled bag of Swedish Fish stuffed beneath her mattress.

Scrape. Lurch. Catch.

Annabeth was almost at the crosswalk; she clamped her hands over her ears as the motorcycle's engine became the yowl of an overstuffed blender.

Scrape, lurch, catch.

There had to be at least one fish left . . . maybe one of the stale ones she had tossed away in a moment of weakness . . . . Perhaps it was hidden in the folds of her blanket, waiting for her to find it . . . .

Scrape, lurch, ca—

There are pros and cons to gravity.

Pro: Gravity is a force that keeps _Homo sapiens _from floating upward and being claimed by the void of space that threatens to boil their tongues and bloat their bodies until they become a weightless batch of deformed corpses.

Con: When you happened to be a sleep-deprived and, by extension, clumsy teenager such as Annabeth, who found herself falling into the path of a speeding motorcycle with no way to stop herself, gravity could be a sizable, and possibly fatal, inconvenience.

Conclusion: Gravity was a bitch.

But as she fell, limbs flailing and textbooks walloping and her pathetically short life of seventeen years flashing before her eyes, another pro of gravity appeared: When the hand shot out and grabbed her backpack, it was due to gravity's unyielding laws than its owner was able to wrench her back, out of the street, just before the motorcycle screamed past like a banshee on steroids.

Annabeth dimly because aware of a hand gripping her shoulder: rounded fingernails, olive-brown skin several shades darker than her tan, slender fingers stained with blue paint that smeared against her aviator jacket.

"Are you okay?" a voice asked, medium-pitched and taut with concern.

Squinting up, Annabeth saw a face that looked vaguely facelike, with facelike features and a facelike shape, but everything else was blurred into the expansive void of facelike qualities by the adrenaline skidding through her body.

"Uh . . . I-I'm fine," she stuttered, although really her mouth tasted like regurgitated Swedish Fish, and her vision looked as if someone had plastered kaleidoscopes to her corneas, and she was pretty sure her voice had shot up an entire octave, making her sound like she had just inhaled a helium balloon. "You can let go now. Like, now. Right now."

The hand instantly retreated. Annabeth kept her balance for three whole seconds, but then her knees started wobbling like a plate of rubbery flan, and then everything was tilting sideways, and then the hand was gripping her shoulder again and there was another one supporting her forearm.

"Um," the voice said, "you look like you're about to black out, so if you can't see anything, then please know that me grabbing you was purely in an oh-shit-she's-falling way, and not a serial-killer-about-to-drag-you-into-a-white-van sort of way. Just, you know, in case you were wondering."

Annabeth finally managed to assemble the blurry fragments of the world. The first thing that came into focus was the eyebrows. They were—

"Purple," she blurted out.

The boy supporting her tried to look up at his eyebrows, seemed to realize that such a feat was impossible, and looked sheepish. "Oh, yeah," he said. He shook his longish black hair out of his face, leaving his eyebrows—both dyed an outspoken purple than clashed horribly with his green eyes—on full display. "I kinda forgot about that, actually."

"You forgot your face was assaulted by a melting purple crayon?" she asked incredulously, stepping out of his grip and planting her feet on the pavement square adjacent to his. "Or did you just forget you were holding a melting crayon when you washed your face?"

Was this the proper response to almost getting pancaked by a motorcycle? she wondered. Were you supposed to attack a confirmed non-serial killer for the way their styled their facial hair? Did eyebrows even _count _as facial hair?

The boy's purple eyebrows shot up like uncorked champagne. "Wait," he said, making a T with his hands as the corners of his lips twitched upward, as if calling for a time-out during a game of tag. "You're accusing _me _of being a forgetful klutz? Isn't that a bit pretentious for the girl who just tripped over her own feet?"

Annabeth's face flushed. "I didn't trip over—I mean, that was—it was_ completely_ intentional." As the boy's smile increased, she considered stomping her foot like a toddler, but after deciding that such actions were beneath her, she settled for blowing a stray curl off her face and scowling. All in all, after nearly dying less than five minutes ago, she thought she was handling things fairly well. "Alright, fine," she said. "Maybe I am a bit pretentious. But subtlety was never my strong suit, anyway."

And with that she walked away.

She didn't make it three lines down the crosswalk before he caught up. Falling into step beside her, he said, "Kool-Aid."

What had she done to deserve this? Couldn't it be enough for her to bid farewell, walk away, and go home to her hedgehog, Sniffly, who was surely waiting for her to return?

"My eyebrows," the boy continued, his eyes glinting. He had the type of eyes that looked like they were constantly laughing—not the laughing-at-you type, but the kind that invited you to laugh along, as if he was holding a private joke and wanted to let you in on the fun.

"It's Kool-Aid," he explained, "not melted wax from a crayon." He barked a laugh. "Although knowing my younger sister and her friends, that option was probably on the table at one point."

The painted asphalt beneath Annabeth's feet thawed to pavement. She quickened her pace, making her backpack bounce up and down, and its encased textbooks seemed to cackle with glee as they thwacked against her back. "Is this the part," she said, "where I ask you what inspired you to dye your eyebrows—your eyebrows, of all things—a purple so bright it probably makes every Claire's store you pass cry with jealousy?"

The apartments to her left looked brighter, cheerier than the condos. Instead of artfully draped burlap sacks and waxed pumpkins, cotton spiderwebs stretched between entrances and gummy stickers clung to windows. _Happy Halloween!_ read the assembled letters on a ground-floor window; _hAuNtEd HoUsE_ boasted another, this one neighbored by grinning ghosts and black cats with frizzy tails.

The boy looked affronted: purple eyebrows scrunched together, eyes widened comically, and his nose, which was long and somewhat broad, crinkled at the edges. "First off," he said, placing a hand over his chest as if she had personally offended him with her lack of knowledge, "I wasn't the one why dyed them. I was the unwilling victim, actually. Let's just say that I won't be falling asleep on any more couches, especially when my sister's hosting a sleepover."

Maybe this was her punishment for insulting his eyebrows. Maybe she had actually been hit by that motorcycle, gone to hell, and been sentenced to eternally suffer the horrors of social interaction as punishment for not living up to her mother's expectations for her.

"Huh," Annabeth said. And then, because she was an even bigger bitch than gravity: "You were dumb enough to fall asleep during a girls' slumber party?"

The boy chuckled and tucked his hands in the pocket of his green sweatshirt, which was emblazoned with the neon-pink letters Drama Club across the front. "Yeah, that one's on me"—God, all Annabeth wanted to do was go home—"But I wasn't in the mood to do my homework"—go home and feed her hedgehog—"so I took a nap in order to loophole the guilt of procrastination."

Annabeth stopped. Blinked twice. And then, running his last sentence through her mind, turned to face him, her brow furrowing. "You just verbed the word loophole."

He seemed to consider this for a moment, then said, "And you just verbed the word verb."

They were both stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. He only had a few inches on her five-foot-nine height, so she didn't have to crane her neck as she stared at him, unblinking, her fingers harvesting tiny bits of fluff from the fleece-lined pockets of her jacket. "Loophole," she repeated.

A wry smile arched over his face. "If you're asking me if I know how to knit, then you're gonna be pretty disappointed."

"That was a lame joke," she said evenly. "Loophole isn't even a real stitch."

"Your soul is truly one of kindness and sincerity," he said, not missing a beat. "You warm my heart with your honest words."

Annabeth pursed her lips. Tapped her pocketed fingers against her hip. Tried not to focus on the way his dark hair fell in a choppy cut, just grazing his jaw. Failed at not focusing on it and then failed again at not focusing on the fact that she was standing in front of the confident-and-kind-of-pretty stranger in her week-old jeans, curls that hadn't been combed in longer, and an aviator jacket she had fished from the garbage last year.

"You're weird," she finally said.

And then she walked away again.

"You do that a lot!" he shouted after her.

Tucking her head against a sudden gust of wind, Annabeth ran across the next crosswalk just before the stoplight turned green. As a river of cars flooded the street between her and the boy whose name she didn't know, she increased her pace to a jog and didn't look back.

* * *

The next time Annabeth saw the boy, he was standing at a different crosswalk, scrolling through his phone as he waited for the pedestrian light signal to turn green. The neon-pink letters Percy Jackson were scrawled across the back of his sweatshirt. Assuming the sweatshirt wasn't borrowed, that meant the boy with the purple eyebrows, a PhD in sarcasm, and a penchant for verbing nouns now had a name.

Percy Jackson.

Annabeth slowed. For a moment she debated ducking into an alley and taking an alternative route home, but then she realized that was ridiculous. It was a free country—there was no reason she should be nervous to stand next to a boy she had spoken to once; there was no reason her mouth should be flooding with a pint of saliva. Her pulse thrumming against her head, she clicked her earbuds' volume button until Bon Jovi's raspy croon spiked against her eardrums. She fisted her hands. Swung them at her sides. Took a step toward him.

And then turned and walked in the opposite direction.

It wasn't that big of a deal, she reasoned as she ducked around a corner, hitching her backpack over one shoulder. After all, what were the odds, in a city as big as this one, that she would run into the stranger who'd saved her life for a third time?

* * *

**A/N: Depending on the response to this story, I might continue it, so if you want to see another chapter, drop a note to let me know.**


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